American Art Collaborative

"Hunters, after wounding the Buffalo and seeing him fall, sometimes alight from their horses and approach. In this case they have reckoned without their host:- the animal has again regained his feet and gives battle. One of them to escape his fury has thrown down his blanket, in order to have time to regain his saddle;- on this unlucky blanket, the Buffalo is expending his fury, under the pleasing delu-[sion] that he is pitching into somebody, and while so engaged, another shot is prepared for him which gives him his quietus." A.J. Miller, extracted from "The West of Alfred Jacob Miller" (1837). In July 1858 William T. Walters commissioned 200 watercolors at twelve dollars apiece from Baltimore born artist Alfred Jacob Miller. These paintings were each accompanied by a descriptive text, and were delivered in installments over the next twenty-one months and ultimately were bound in three albums. Transcriptions of field-sketches drawn during the 1837 expedition that Miller had undertaken to the annual fur-trader's rendezvous in the Green River Valley (in what is now western Wyoming), these watercolors are a unique record of the closing years of the western fur trade.